Two Graves p-12

by Douglas Preston

  “Well?” a small voice demanded from out of the dark.

  Felder’s jaw worked. “I—”

  “Well? What is it?”

  Felder cleared his throat. This was going to be even harder than he’d expected.

  “Are you here about the gatehouse?” the voice asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, are you here about renting the gatehouse?”

  Seize the opportunity, you fool! “The gatehouse? Ah, yes. Yes, I am.”

  The door closed in his face.

  Felder stood on the top step, perplexed, for a full minute before the door opened again—wider this time. A diminutive woman stood before him. She was dressed in a fox fur, slightly moth-eaten, and—bizarrely—a broad-brimmed straw hat of the kind one might take to the beach. An expensive-looking black leather purse hung from a narrow arm.

  There was a shifting in the darkness behind her, and then the entire doorway seemed to move. As it resolved into the light, Felder realized the shape was a man. He was very tall—at least six and a half feet—and built like a linebacker. His features and complexion made Felder believe he might be from ancient Fiji, or perhaps the South Sea Islands. He wore an odd, shapeless garment with an orange-and-white batik pattern; his hair was cropped very close to his head; crude but remarkably complex tattoos covered his face and arms. He looked pointedly at Felder but did not speak. That must be the manservant, Felder thought. He swallowed uncomfortably and tried not to stare at the tattoos. All that was missing was a bone in the nose.

  “You’re lucky,” the woman said, pulling on a pair of white gloves. “I was about to stop running the advertisement. It seemed like a good idea—after all, who wouldn’t be honored to rent such a place?—but then again, one doesn’t understand the modern mind. Going on two months now in the Gazette—waste of good money.” She walked past him, down the steps, and then turned back. “Well, come along then, come along.”

  Felder followed as she led the way through the dry weeds, rattling in the winter wind. From what the woman at the Southport Museum had implied, he’d expected Miss Wintour to be a superannuated, withered crone. But instead she appeared to be in her early sixties, with a face that reminded him vaguely of an aging Bette Davis—well maintained, even attractive. She had an accent to match—the kind associated with the North Shore of Long Island in better days, where his own family came from, only rarely heard anymore. As he walked, he was all too aware of the hulking manservant trailing silently behind them.

  “What is it?” she asked out of the blue.

  “I’m sorry,” he replied. “What is what?”

  “Your name, of course!”

  “Oh. Sorry. It’s… Feldman. John Feldman.”

  “And your profession?”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  At this, she stopped to look back at him. “Can you furnish references?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. If it’s necessary.”

  “There are formalities that must be seen to, young man. After all, this isn’t just any gatehouse. It was designed by Stanford White.”

  “Stanford White?”

  “The only gatehouse he ever designed.” Her look turned suspicious again. “That was in the advertisement. Didn’t you read it?”

  “Ah, yes,” Felder said quickly. “Slipped my mind. Sorry.”

  “Hmpf,” the woman said, as if such a fact should be seared into one’s memory. She continued wading through the dead grass and weeds.

  As they rounded the rear edge of the mansion, the gatehouse came into view. It was of the same dark stone as the main building, guarding an entrance—and driveway—that apparently no longer existed. Its windows were cracked and hazy with grime, and several had been boarded up. The two-story structure did have graceful lines, Felder noted, but they were overcome by shabbiness and decay.

  The old woman led the way to the building’s only entrance—a door, held shut with a padlock. Interminable fishing in her purse produced a key, which she fitted to the lock. Then she pushed the door open and waved at the interior with a flourish.

  “Look at that!” she said proudly.

  Felder peered inside. Thick motes of dust hung in the air, almost choking the sunlight struggling through the windows. He could make out dim shapes, but nothing else.

  The old woman—apparently irritated that he hadn’t dissolved into rapture—stepped inside and flicked on a light switch. “Come in, come in!” she said crossly.

  Felder stepped inside. Behind them, the manservant stopped just within the doorway—he barely fit—and stood there, arms crossed over his barrel chest, blocking the exit.

  A single bare bulb struggled to life high overhead. Felder heard the skittering of mice, disturbed by their entrance. He looked around. Heavy cobwebs hung from the rafters, and a riot of discarded jetsam from a long-gone era—perambulators, steamer trunks, a dressmaker’s mannequin—filled much of the space. Dust rose in small puffs with each step he took. Greenish gray mold dappled the walls like the rosettes of a panther.

  “Stanford White,” the woman repeated proudly. “You’ll never see another like it.”

  “Very nice,” Felder murmured.

  She swept a hand around. “Oh, it naturally needs the touch of a duster here and there, nothing that can’t be done of an afternoon. Five thousand a month.”

  “Five thousand,” Felder repeated.

  “Furnished, and cheap enough at the price, I should say! The furnishings are not to be moved about, however. Utilities aren’t included, of course. You’ll have to pay for coal for the furnace. But the building’s built so well you probably won’t even be needing heat.”

  “Mmmm,” said Felder. It couldn’t be much above freezing.

  “Bedroom and bath are upstairs, kitchen is in the next room. Would you like to see them?”

  “No, I think not. Thanks anyway.”

  The woman looked around with no small amount of pride, blind to the dust and grime and mold. “I’m very particular about who I allow on the premises. I won’t tolerate any licentious behavior or guests of the opposite sex. This is an historic structure, and of course I have a family name to protect—I’m sure you understand.”

  Felder nodded absently.

  “But you seem a nice enough young man. Perhaps—we shall have to see—you can take tea with me, certain afternoons, in the front parlor.”

  The front parlor. Felder recalled what the woman at the Southport Museum had said: A delegation from Harvard came down. Offered a tidy sum. She wouldn’t even let them in the front door.

  He realized Miss Wintour was looking at him with an expectant frown. “Well? I’m not out here for my health, you know. Five thousand a month, plus utilities.”

  Incredibly, as if somebody else were speaking the words, Felder heard himself answer. “I’ll take it.”

  22

  D’AGOSTA HAD SEEN A LOT OF REALLY SICK SHIT IN HIS life—he’d never forget those two dismembered corpses up in Waldo Falls, Maine—but this took the cake. This was the goriest scene yet in a string of exceptionally gruesome murders. The young woman’s body had been stripped and splayed out on its back, dismembered limbs forming something like the face of a human clock, a corona of blood spread out like a sunburst beneath it all, various organs arrayed around the edges like a goddamn still life. Then there was the little toe—the extra little toe—that had been lovingly placed on the victim’s forehead.

  All this was capped by the message finger-painted onto her torso—TAG, YOU’RE IT!

  The M.E., forensic units, crime-scene units, latents, and the photographer had all done their work, collected their evidence, and gone. That had taken hours. Now it was his turn—his and Gibbs. D’Agosta had to admit, Gibbs had been pretty good about the wait. He hadn’t flashed his shield and elbowed his way in, the way other feds of his experience had done. Over the years, the homicide division had tried to lay down guidelines about the brass intruding into crime scenes, interrupting the work of the specialists, and D
’Agosta took those rules very seriously. He didn’t know how many times he’d seen a crime scene messed up by some honcho wanting a photo shoot, or showing his political friends around, or just pulling rank for the sake of it.

  The room was hot from the bright lights and there was a bad smell in the air, the stench of blood, fecal matter, and death. D’Agosta took a turn around the corpse, his eye roving over every little detail, burning it into his memory, deconstructing and reconstructing the scene while keeping it free flowing. It was another meticulous killing, planned and executed with the precision of a military campaign. The scene exuded a feeling of self-confidence, even arrogance, on the part of the killer.

  Indeed, as D’Agosta took it all in, he had a sense of déjà vu; there was something about this crime scene that reminded him of something else, and as he rolled that thought around in his mind he realized what it was. It had the look and feel of a museum diorama—everything highly crafted and set in its place, designed to create an impression, an illusion, a visual impact.

  But of what? And why?

  He glanced over at Gibbs, who was crouching on his heels, examining the writing on the torso. The arrayed lights cast his multiple shadows across the crime scene. “This time,” he said, “the perp used a glove.”

  D’Agosta nodded. An interesting observation. His opinion of Gibbs went up another notch.

  He was frankly more than a little dubious that Pendergast’s brother was behind this. He saw no connection whatsoever between the M.O. of this killer and what Diogenes had done in the past. As for motive, unlike Diogenes’s previous killing spree, this time he had no discernible motive to kill these randomly selected victims. The figure he had seen on the security tapes, while he was approximately the right height, weight, and build, did not move in that smooth fashion he recalled of Diogenes. The eyes were different. Diogenes did not strike him at all as the kind of psycho to start dismembering himself and leaving the parts at the crime scenes. Finally, there was the little matter of his alleged fall into a Sicilian volcano. The only witness to it was absolutely convinced he was dead. And she was a damn good witness—even if more than a little crazy herself.

  Pendergast had refused to tell him why he believed the killer was his brother. All in all, D’Agosta felt this strange idea of Pendergast’s was a product of his deep depression over his wife’s murder, combined with an overdose of drugs. In retrospect, he was sorry he had tried to bring Pendergast into the case—and he felt damned relieved the special agent had not shown up at this crime scene.

  Gibbs rose from his long assessment of the corpse. “Lieutenant, I’m beginning to think we might be dealing with two killers. Perhaps a Leopold and Loeb sort of partnership.”

  “Really? We only have one person on videotape, one set of bloody footprints, one knife.”

  “Quite right. But think about it. The three hotels all have extremely high security. They’re crawling with employees. In each case our killer has gotten himself in and out without being surprised, stopped, interrupted, or challenged. One way to explain that is if he had an accomplice—a spotter.”

  D’Agosta nodded slowly.

  “Our killer does the wet work. He’s the magnet of our scrutiny. He’s the guy waving at the camera saying, Hi, Ma, look at me! But there’s a partner out there, somewhere—who’s just the opposite. Who’s invisible, who fades into the woodwork, who sees and hears all. They have no contact during the commission of the crime, except that they are secretly and continuously in communication.”

  “Via an earpiece or some similar device.”

  “Exactly.”

  D’Agosta liked the idea at once. “So we look for this guy. Because he’s got to be on our security tapes.”

  “Probably. But of course he’ll be very, very carefully disguised.”

  Suddenly a long shadow, emerging from the bedroom, fell across the corpse, startling D’Agosta. A moment later a tall figure in black emerged, backlit, his blond-white hair a bright halo around his shadowed face, making him look not like an angel but like some ghastly revenant, a specter of the night.

  “Two killers, you say?” came the honeyed drawl.

  “Pendergast!” said D’Agosta. “What the hell? How’d you get in here?”

  “The same way you did, Vincent. I’ve just been examining the bedroom.”

  His voice was not exactly friendly, but at least, thought D’Agosta, it had a steeliness behind it that had been lacking during their last encounter.

  D’Agosta glanced at Gibbs, who was staring at Pendergast, failing to control the disapproval on his face.

  Another step forward and the bright light fell athwart Pendergast’s face, raking it from the side, chiseling his features into marble-like perfection. The face turned. “Greetings, Agent Gibbs.”

  “The same to you,” said Gibbs.

  “I trust we have liaised to your satisfaction?”

  A silence. “Since you mentioned it, no, I haven’t yet had confirmation of your role in the case.”

  A tsk-tsk sound from Pendergast. “Ah, that FBI bureaucracy, so very dependable.”

  “But of course,” said Gibbs, hardly able to disguise his ill will, “I always welcome the assistance of a fellow agent.”

  “Assistance,” Pendergast repeated. He suddenly was in motion, moving around the corpse, bending quickly, examining articles with a loupe, picking up something with tweezers that went into a test tube, more rapid, almost manic movement—and then he had completed the circuit and was face-to-face with Gibbs again.

  “Two, you say?”

  Gibbs nodded. “A working hypothesis only,” he said. “We’re obviously not at the point where we can draw conclusions.”

  “I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’m terribly interested.”

  D’Agosta felt a certain uneasiness at Pendergast’s choice of words, but he kept silent.

  “Well,” said Gibbs. “I don’t know if the lieutenant has shared with you our provisional report, but we see this as the work of an organized killer—or killers—who operate in a ritual fashion. I’ll get you the report, if you don’t have it.”

  “Oh, I have it. But there’s nothing like hearing it—how does the quaint saying go? Straight from the horse’s mouth. And the motive?”

  “These types of killers,” Gibbs continued evenly, “generally kill for reasons of libidinous gratification, which can be satisfied only by the exercise of extreme control and power over others.”

  “And the extra body parts?”

  “That is unique in our experience. The hypothesis our profilers are developing is that the aggressor is overwhelmed with feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness—perhaps due to childhood abuse—and is acting out a sort of slow-motion suicide. Our experts are working from that conjecture.”

  “How fortunate for us. And the message, Tag, you’re it?”

  “This type of killer often taunts law enforcement.”

  “Your database has an answer for everything.”

  Gibbs didn’t seem to know how to take this, and neither did D’Agosta. “It is a very good database, I’ll admit,” Gibbs went on. “As I’m sure you know, Agent Pendergast, the joint NCAVC/BSU profiling system includes tens of thousands of entries. It’s based on statistics, aggregates, and correlates. It doesn’t mean our killer necessarily fits the pattern, but it does give us something to follow.”

  “Yes, indeed. It gives you a trail to follow deep into the wilderness, at least.”

  This rather strange metaphor dangled, D’Agosta trying to figure out exactly what it was Pendergast meant. A tense silence enveloped them as Pendergast continued gazing at Gibbs, his head slightly tilted, as if examining a specimen. Then he turned to D’Agosta and seized him by the hand. “Well, Vincent,” he said. “Here we are again, partners on a case. I want to thank you for—how should I put it?—helping save my life.”

  And with that, he turned and strode out the door at a swift pace, black suit coat flapping crazily behind him.

&nb
sp; 23

  LIEUTENANT D’AGOSTA SAT, SLUMPED FORWARD, IN VIDEO Lab C on the nineteenth floor of One Police Plaza. He’d left the scene of the third murder just an hour before, and he felt like he’d gone fifteen rounds with a prizefighter.

  D’Agosta turned to the man working the video equipment, a skinny dweeb named Hong. “Fifteenth-floor feed. Back sixty seconds.”

  Hong worked the keyboard, and the black-and-white image on the central monitor changed, going backward rapidly in reverse motion.

  As he watched the screen, D’Agosta mentally went over how the crime had gone down. The killer had forced his way into the room—once again, based on the Royal Cheshire security tapes, he’d seemed to know just when the door was going to open—and dragged the unfortunate woman into the bedroom of the hotel suite. He’d killed her, then proceeded with his ghastly work. The whole thing took fewer than ten minutes.

  But then the woman’s husband had returned to the suite. The killer had hidden in the bathroom. The man discovered the body of his wife, and his frantic cries were overheard by a hotel security officer, who entered the suite, saw the body, and called the police. The killer escaped in the resulting confusion. All this had been corroborated by the security tapes, as well as by the evidence found in the suite and by the statements of the husband and the detective.

  It seemed straightforward enough. But the devil—the really weird shit, actually—was in the details. How, for example, did the killer know to hide in the bathroom? If he’d been disturbed in his bedroom work by the click of the front door lock, there was no way he could have made it to the bathroom in time without being seen by the husband. He must have hidden himself before the key card was swiped through the lock. He must have been alerted by some other cue.

  Pretty damn clear the guy had an accomplice. But where?

  “Start it right there,” D’Agosta told Hong.

  He watched the corridor video for perhaps the tenth time as the husband entered the suite. Five seconds later, the front door opened again and the killer—wearing a fedora and a trench coat—stepped out. But then—against all logic—he ducked back inside the room a second time. A few moments later, the hotel dick rounded a corner and came into view.